Karen Marker

Karen joined the College of Engineering in her current role in November of 2010. She provides grant strategy and writing support for all College of Engineering faculty, with a particular focus on supporting new and untenured faculty. She has helped faculty members to obtain funding from federal organizations such as the Department of Energy, the National Institutes for Health, the National Science Foundation, and NASA, as well as state funding and corporate funding as from Google and the W.M. Keck Foundation. In 2014, proposal development efforts helped to secure $10 million in NIH funding to launch an interdisciplinary Center of Biomedical Research Excellence in Matrix Biology.

Karen's role during proposal development is to bring shape to funding ideas, and examine strategy, document structure, and visual and editorial design to ensure that faculty communicate ideas effectively in clear, readable proposals. Karen also provided support in the 2010–11 academic year as a Senior Investigator for the NSF-grant funded STEM Station.

Given the emerging research and student interest in sustainability and a growing need to address complex, interdisciplinary problems, Karen maintains a particular interest in helping faculty who want to promote systems thinking, product and process design to minimize resource use, environmental stewardship, and a greater sharing of ideas between business people and technologists.

Karen brings more than fifteen years of corporate experience to this role, where as a writer and creative strategist consulting with a variety of Fortune 500 companies, she helped the teams she worked with produce proposals, design documents, and presentations that clearly described their ideas. She also ensured that those ideas were responsive to client needs, priorities, and desired performance outcomes.

Karen has a master’s degree in Instructional Systems from Indiana University (it’s much like a degree from the college’s Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning Department), and a BA from Brown University in both art and English. She has served on the board of the non-profit Usful Glassworks (then Sustainable Futures), performs in community theater from time-to-time, and maintains an art portfolio at http://www.coroflot.com/kmarker